Re: on security and patch formats

[Tim Hollebeek <tim at hollebeek dot com>]

> If you are really worried about it, we can make some modest changes to
> an FTP server.  In particular, as I mentioned, `arch' never needs to
> _modify_ files in the repository, only to add, rename and delete
> them.  It never needs to delete precious files -- only lock files and
> cache files.   One can imagine adding a feature to an FTP server that
> implicitly manipulates the permissions on files and directories to
> help ensure that precious files, once created, can not be modified or
> deleted by the server under any circumstances.

Have you thought this out?

rename implies a soft delete ability : you can't destroy information,
but you can make file existence checks fail on arbitrary files.

even worse, rename + add implies modify.